A 69 year-old man in the Netherlands has asked a court there to lower his legal age to 49. He feels 49, and his doctor says he’s got the body of a 49 year-old. Undoubtedly that much is true. But his truth is too small. Skeptics point out the Old Testament’s restrictions against eating shellfish, and demand to know why Christians “don’t really believe what the Bible says after all.” Their reference to that restriction is true, but their truth…
We know the truth. We know the truth. We know the truth. We know the truth. And we know the truth. Fighting words? See my recent Stream articles on this, and watch my explanation here. Image Credit(s): Austin Neill, Unsplash.
Christians get charged with arrogance for saying we hold the one truth for everyone. In reality, we don’t hold the truth, the truth holds us.
Yesterday I wrote about massive confusion present in the first half page of Shawn Otto’s book The War on Science. Today I asked myself whether I’d jumped off some cliff of irresponsibility by judging a book by practically less than its cover. I didn’t. I didn’t judge the book at all, really. But I did judge its author, and I don’t think there’s anything irresponsible in it at all. I’ve also got some thought about why that judgment matters. You…
How do we respond to a tragic horror like this weekend’s shooting in Orlando? If you’re just asking now, you might be asking the wrong question. It’s not that there’s no answer. There is, and on one level it’s quite simple. I do not say it is easy, but at least it can be stated simply: We respond in love according to truth and grace, as always. Jesus was full of grace and truth (John 1:14), and God is love…
My daughter called home yesterday from college, during the first session of a course on World History Since 1500. “I’m dropping this course,” she said. “The teacher said she’s not going to cover any wars. She thinks it’s more important to study the ways people have saved other people than to talk about people killing people.” Granted, I heard the story at third-hand. Maybe the teacher just meant she wasn’t going to cover war in great detail. I have to…
Here’s postscript to my post Saturday on truth and humility and blogging. I’m convinced it’s possible to think, with no contradiction, “I am no better person than you, but my opinions are better than yours.” It sounds arrogant, but on a closer look there’s nothing necessarily wrong with it at all. By the end of this post I’ll have a question for you, though: is it possible for someone to know that his or her opinions are better than others’?…
I’ve just published a piece on the good news of life in Christ. It’s his free gift of life to be received in both humility and truth. That was going to be all I said about it, except that the passage from Jesus’ teaching I quoted there (Luke 18:9-14) troubles me for how I live it out here on the blog. (This piece goes with that one, but its purpose is so different I wanted to start a different discussion thread…
Arrogant Christianity? It’s awkward being a Christian these days. We claim to know the truth about God, morality, and host of other contested things. We believe this truth is unique and applies to all people for all time. We believe that where other so-called truths contradict the one we hold to, those other “truths” are wrong and ours is right. We believe that the truth is so tied together with Jesus Christ that he could claim, “I am the truth.”…
